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Don’t worry, you’re bees won’t swarm … yet. Bees won’t swarm until this is a nectar flow. The new hive would starve in a week without nectar coming in. The first nectar flow strong enough for swarming is dandelions, which also happens to be the perfect time for first splits.
I know the weather is beautiful and we are all getting anxious to be in the midst of our beekeeping year. But, remember, this is WI; it will be cold again. Looking at the weather, we will have highs in the upper 40s again next week.
As has been mentioned, the most important part to considering the earliest you can split, is the availability of drones. While looking through my hives, I saw a smattering of drones in the strongest colonies, some even capped. So, it is theoretically possible to get a queen mated from a split now. But, that will only work if there are other strong hives near you and it will still be risky. Even my hives with drones don’t have the swaths of drone comb that make for reliable mating. The most likely drones to mate with now are the ones brought in with packages. Also, keep in mind that it takes drones awhile to mature and be able to mate after emerging.
The other question, besides if it’s possible, is “Is it beneficial to split this early?” The answer to that is a resounding “No!” This time of year the limiting factor to colony strength and buildup is heat. The bees have more nutrition than they need (pollen is flooding into the hives), but can only raise as much brood as they can keep warm. The larger the cluster, the more efficient it is. Multiple smaller clusters have more surface area and can keep less brood warm. So, if you are trying to maximize the number of splits you can make to increase your hives, it is still better to wait longer to split. You’ll end up with more bees splitting later. This doesn’t even take into account the fact that weather can turn cold and freeze out small splits, or make mating impossible.
I used to leave my colonies alone and not touch them until the dandelions were blooming (I would peek to make sure they had enough sugar and add winter patties if they needed them) and this worked fine. The only reason I started doing more manipulation earlier is because my nuc customers are anxious to get their bees. So, I do some things to try to get my hives moving more quickly in the spring, and to get them to raise a lot of drones early. Again, plentiful, quality drones are key to good queens. So, I add full frames of drone comb to my best hives in my mating locations to flood the area with quality drones.
If you are worried they are going to swarm (which they’re not) or you want to encourage them to build up fast for additional splitting later in the spring, the best thing you can do now is to add a ‘checkerboarded’ box to the top of the hive. If you can get out on one of these beautifully warm days, I take my hives apart so I can clean all the dead bees off the bottom board and out of any unused boxes at the bottom. Then, I might remove a box from the bottom if there are some that are completely unused, but this is completely unnecessary; empty space at the bottom of a hive is mostly irrelevant this time of year. Then, I put it all back together, exactly as it was. If I’m very curious, I might pull a frame or two to check on brood progress, but I am not doing a full inspection frame by frame. Then, I might add a pollen patty on top of their current hive. Then added the ‘checkerboarded’ box of alternating drawn, empty comb and honey frames. If it’s a ‘breeder colony’ I will include a frame of drone comb. The pollen and checkerboarded box gives them a great way to expand upwards with room for brood and plenty of food.
Of course, only do this to strong hives. Weak hives are benefiting from the heat that gets trapped against the cover and adding an additional box will actually slow down buildup.
Again, because beekeepers are anxious to get their nucs from me, I push the envelope as much as possible in the spring to get quality mated queens as early as possible. All this rigmarole is unnecessary as long as your hive has food and space.
This spring has been quite warm so far, and I think splitting will be early (if things don’t cool down for long again). I did make a spreadsheet that calculates the EARLIEST you can expect things in the process of raising a nuc based on observations. I can plug in the dates I see drone eggs, larvae, etc. Here it is with a range of dates for illustration.
Drone Eggs | 1 | 25-Mar | 30-Mar | 10-Apr |
Drone Larvae | 3 | 27-Mar | 1-Apr | 12-Apr |
Drone Capped | 10 | 3-Apr | 8-Apr | 19-Apr |
Drone Emerge | 24 | 17-Apr | 22-Apr | 3-May |
Drone Fertile | 38 | 1-May | 6-May | 17-May |
Queen Egg | 1 | 12-Apr | 17-Apr | 28-Apr |
Split Can Be Made | 4 | 15-Apr | 20-Apr | 1-May |
Queen Capped | 8 | 19-Apr | 24-Apr | 5-May |
Queen Emerge | 16 | 27-Apr | 2-May | 13-May |
Queen Mating First | 20 | 1-May | 6-May | 17-May |
First Eggs | 24 | 5-May | 10-May | 21-May |
First Capped | 33 | 14-May | 19-May | 30-May |
Confident Sale Date | 40 | 21-May | 26-May | 6-Jun |
Sorry this turned into a novel again, but I hope it was helpful.
-Paul Z
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PS, all these early inspections also destroy the first early drones that are almost certainly on burr comb between the boxes.
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On Apr 6, 2021, at 1:33 PM, Scott Johnson <sajjo...@gmail.com> wrote:
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On Apr 6, 2021, at 2:41 PM, Paul Zelenski <paulze...@gmail.com> wrote:
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I do raise locally mated queens, which is why I need to do so much prep work in order to ensure proper drone coverage for quality mated queens. It takes over a month from day of split until the queen is mated and has capped brood to guarantee her quality. Which means that splits made at the end of April will be ready around the end of May or the first week of June. Most people starting a hive are already getting anxious to have their bees by then, and it already takes explaining why they can’t have them sooner.
If I purchased queens, I could both make my splits later and provide them to customers earlier since it only takes a couple weeks to have a queen accepted and laying. If I knew of a queen provider that had quality, WI winter hardy queens, I would consider it. Otherwise using purchased queens for my nucs would really make them no different than nuckages.
I used to sell nucs with the overwintered queens and let my hives produce the new queens. This was a way to provide the nucs to customers earlier as well as give them a queen proven to have what it takes to make it through winter. Unfortunately, many customers were not prepared to handle second year queens and had problems with swarming despite my warnings, so I stopped. Perhaps I should consider this as an option again for more experienced keepers looking for an earlier local option.
You can order queens this early without any problems, since they are tons produced in CA or down South. My understanding, however, is that you need to reserve them in advance. All the package producers and commercial keepers buy up massive amounts of queens this time of year. So, if you just call now you probably won’t get any for awhile. Any northern queen producers are going to be in the same boat as we are and not able to provide any queens until later in the summer.
The saskatraz queen producers tried to set up a system where they proved their queens in Canada and then sent them to CA for grafting and production to get the best of both worlds. My experiences with saskatraz queens, however, were not impressive.
I do buy queens throughout the summer to improve or diversify my stock, but those usually come from Northern producers and are used for later splits that I keep and overwinter. If they overwinter well, they are added into my splittable population.
Like I said, I checkerboard, add pollen, and add drone comb to my hives to encourage early drones. This year with the early warm spell, I was able to do that on 3/19. I am definitely pushing the envelope on how early this can be done, but very strong hives will respond to the pollen with substantial buildup and drone production. Before making any splits, I need to assess the drone population to be sure the queens will be mated properly. I also meant that I will be considering splits in 2 weeks, but depending what I find 3 weeks or more is more likely.
Again, if I were just splitting for myself, I would save myself a lot of hassle and just split later in May when the bees naturally would be considering swarming. Splitting during swarm season is the obvious, natural timing.
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I found a bit of time this morning to check my hives and thought I’d provide some pics as a follow-up.
Even with my checkerboarding and pollen, you can see that, while there are a lot of large larvae, there are few capped drones. The second pic has more capped drones, but I still no where near enough to get a bunch of queens mated. So, if we assume those chubby grubs will be capped in the next few days, the EARLIEST I could make spits would be a bit over two weeks from now. It’ll be much safer to wait a bit beyond that since there are a lot of drones on the way right behind that.
I did see full frames of pollen stored and more queen cups that I would have expected. This year is definitely trending towards an early spring and if it continues, people will need to be on the lookout for swarms earlier than usual.
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On Apr 8, 2021, at 8:57 AM, Kerri Phillips <valk...@gmail.com> wrote:
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